Category: Our travel

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Southern California

Our Brazilian delegation went to Los Angeles to explore connections with California universities. We met a bunch of university representatives at the Brazilian consulate in LA. I hope that some permanent matches were made. Diplomacy in many ways is the art of matchmaking. We put the partners together, maybe help them find their common aspirations, but others have to do actual connecting.

Anyway, it was a pretty sweet deal for me and I was flattered that our Brazilian partners wanted me along. That is another function of diplomacy, BTW – diplomatic cover. Our official status helps open doors and legitimize. I know these kinds of values are very soft and I underestimated them for most of my career. I was looking for the cash-value-concrete result. Those come, but sometimes long after. Our value is often part of the process. We are like oil (some might say grease) to smooth things along.

I have been surprised to find that people sometimes remember key phrases from the short speeches I make. I have some stock phrases, but I try to tailor to the circumstances. That is why I rarely know exactly what I will say until I hear what others have said and get a feel for the mood. This is one reason why I know that I should not seek work in contentious issues or ever try to be a spokesman. I do not stick to my talking points. In a field like higher education exchanges, you can get away with this and even prosper doing it. I would not be so lucky trying to “fix” official statements. A man’s gotta know his limitations. Interestingly, this particular limitation hasn’t kicked me very often during my long career in public diplomacy, although I have avoided some “career enhancing” jobs that would have put me in harm’s way.

My pictures are from USC, except for the statue of John Wayne up top, which is in front of the Brazilian Consulate. Steven Spielberg and George Lucas are big supporters of USC. Spielberg was denied admission to the cinema school, but he doesn’t hold a grudge. Imagine how successful he could have been with a decent education.

The Heisman Trophy was won by OJ Simpson. They told me that it is the most photographed among their trophies displayed. They don’t take it down, since OJ was found not guilty and (if the glove don’t fit, you must acquit)– anyway – the OJ that won the trophy was not the same man on trial for murder. This unfortunate incident was in the far in future.

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San Diego NAFSA

I am finally getting around to writing up my notes, a few weeks late. I went to San Diego for the NAFSA conference. I usually would not attend such a thing, but this was the last time I would have to be with some of our Brazilian friends and my final attempt to help make sustainable connections between U.S. and Brazilian educational institutions.

Most of my work consisted of meeting people and attending receptions. I know that most people consider this a perk of the job but believe me when I say that is work for me. I enjoy talking to people; I even like public speaking. But going to reception is less fun for me than writing reports. I don’t like and don’t do well with the small-talk. But I recognize the importance of being there so I was where I could see and be seen.

I cannot complain about being in San Diego, however. It is a pleasant place and I had a pleasant time. I stayed on Coronado Island. It is right across from the Convention Center, where the NAFSA meeting was held. You catch a ferry to get there. It costs only $4.25 and takes only about five minutes. It would have been a little more convenient to stay in the hotel actually at the convention center, but not very much and the hotels there cost a lot more. None of them were available for the per-diem rate. Anyway, I liked the idea of commuting by ferry. It is a very civilized way to go.

Coronado Island is a delightful place. It would be a little too neat for my liking to live there permanently but it is really nice to visit. There is a bike/walk/run trail along the ocean. My hotel had a view of the bay. I walked almost all the way across the island my first morning there. I had to do laundry and evidently there is only one Laundromat on the island. The guy at the hotel said that they could send it out for me, but I am not going to pay a couple dollars to wash a t-shirt. Anyway, it was a nice walk. Because of jet-lag I work up really early and started in the pre-dawn twilight. The place seemed very safe. There are a lot of retired U.S. Navy folks around and they tend to be orderly and peaceful.

My main “problem” and my excuse for not writing in real time is that my computer charger died. I could not find a new one anywhere in town where I could walk. They all have the equipment for telephones. So after the battery went dead, I was w/o computer for a couple days. It is strange how you become accustomed to computers. I wrote in my notebook and I do enjoy actual writing, but it is a very different experience. I think I am more open and honest with myself on paper, since I am pretty sure nobody, probably not even I will ever read it. But on those occasions when I do read, I find it more banal, maybe because it is harder to cancel a line and rewrite with pen and ink than to insert or delete with the computer.

My pictures show the convention center.  Next is the Brazilian section.  They let me hang out there.   The next two pictures show the ferry landing and the ferry.  The next picture is taken from my room.  You can see the convention center across the water and why it is an easy water commute.  Finally is a big fruit boat.

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Rio Negro meeting Rio Solimões

The meeting of the waters is the place where the Rio Negro and the Rio Solimões meet to form the Amazon. The rivers are very different. The Rio Negro is mostly black with a pH of black coffee. The Solimões is like coffee with cream and full of silt. The two meet just past Manaus and the two waters run side by side, visibly different for a few miles.

It is de rigueur to visit the meeting of the waters if you go to Manaus and we did. IMO, it is one of those things that is worth seeing but not worth going to see. It looks like some muddy water mixing in with some less muddy water. The river trip was long, but interesting.

We went up the Solimões. The river is very much alive, lots of fish and plants. We stopped off at a riverside restaurant. The food was unremarkable. It probably was not alone worth the trip. But I did enjoy the lilies and river. I am very fond of these kinds of swamp landscapes. The trees were full of monkeys. You could hear the howler monkeys howling. It was an interesting experience.

Along the river are shacks made most of tin and scraps. The guide told us that government had recently furnished them with electricity and other amenities. I don’t think this is a good thing. It is nice to give people things to make them more comfortable, but perhaps eking a living from the river like this is not something to be encouraged. It is not environmentally friendly to live on these margins either.

Above is a floating gas station.  Lots of things on the rivers.  Below is another future problem.  There are places where you should not build houses.

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On the river

It is maybe wiser to avoid the forest floor, but the river is another story.  I understand that there are also piranha, caiman and snakes in the water, but it seems peaceful and if you stay in the boat it is mostly safe.  The rivers are the highways of the Amazon.

Alex and I took a canoe out for a while.  We are not good at canoe paddling.  Alex has become very strong, much stronger than I am so we are always drifting in the direction his paddle takes us.  It was, however, peaceful and quiet.

The rivers are very wide and the forests are flooded this time of the year, so you really do not see a shoreline, just the tops of trees and bushes.

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Walking in the Amazon jungle

The jungle walk was familiar enough to make me long for the forests of home and different enough that I knew I was not at home anymore.

The forest here is wet, literally dripping with dew and humidity all the time. The ground vegetation is thick, although that may be because this was cut-over. I understand that in the true triple canopy forest, which I don’t think I have ever really seen, it is so dark on the forest floor that not much grows. The forest soil here is not fertile and it there is little organic material. It is all quickly recycled into growing plants. It is a different sort of forest from those I know. I feel connected with the forests back home. Here I am clearly alien. I recognize that this is a wonderful, complex and diverse ecosystem. Maybe that just overwhelms me.

Maybe it is because it is a dangerous place. There are snakes and bugs around that can poison you. If you get stuck in the jungle at night, never sleep on the group. That is why local Indians always use hammocks. If you lay down on the ground for the night, you are likely to still be lying there the next morning, just no longer alive.

We didn’t see any big animals or really animals at all. Many of the animals are nocturnal and all the animals are good at not being seen. Life is dangerous and short for the forest animals here. Beyond that, the soil is not very fertile, so there are not rich supplies of food. This poverty is especially acute on the Rio Negro, since (as mentioned) the river does not have many insects, which form the base of the food pyramid. The nearby Rio Solimões is coffee brown, full of silt and nutrients, and so full of bugs and fish. Tourists like it less because of the bugs and the mud, but it is a more living river.

Francisco, the guide, said that there were jaguars around but not very many. This is good, since jaguars are dangerous. They will attack and kill people and you don’t see them coming. He wears a jaguar tooth around his neck and he showed it around to emphasize his point. Jaguars are stealth hunters. They hide or sneak up and then jump on their prey from behind. They go for the jugular. When they get a hold, they just hold on until the animal, or human, passes out from loss of blood. They are beautiful creatures, but nasty. I recall seeing them at the jaguar sanctuary safely behind a fence. I am glad that we didn’t run into any w/o a fence.

That long brown thing in the picture is an ant nest. Maybe it would be more appropriate to call it an ant hive. The outside was crawling with ants. Francisco squashed a few and rubbed them on his hands. He told us that the native Indians would do that and rub it all over their bodies to mask their scent when hunting. The local Indians are also stealth hunters. They hide or sneak up on their prey and then dispatch them with an arrow or poison dart. Neither has much range in the woods, so they need to get close, close enough to smell the animal and be smelled. The ant juice makes hunting like this practical.

We didn’t see any Indians in the wild. They are not very numerous and those that still live traditionally are protected and contact with them limited. Meeting “wild” Indians is potentially hazardous to all involved. While I was there, I read an article about three people killed by semi-wild Indians. Evidently one of them worked for the electric company and made himself unpopular by trying to collect bills. He was marked for death, but he caught a ride with a couple other people, thereby dooming them too. Those are situations I cannot predict so prefer to avoid.

BTW – walking is not the way you usually get around in the jungle.  It is difficult to walk most places.  With all the water, boat is the best way to go.  Alex and I paddled a little.  I will show pictures in the next post.

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Monkeys are inherently funny

Although they make a big deal about presenting the operation as a scientific endeavor, the monkeys are not really wild and they essentially perform for tourists. When they put out the fruit, the monkeys come. It is interesting to see them all swing on over. They look pretty buff. New World moneys have prehensile tails, i.e. they can grab onto branches with their tails.  Old World monkeys cannot. The red faced monkey above is called locally an “English” monkey, with reference to the red skin which the locals think resembles a fair-skinned Englishman with a sunburn.

The monkeys are not dangerous, but we were told that they might try to grab jewels or cameras. They did not.  They paid no attention to us at all. You can see Espen with the monkeys in the picture below. Espen is the one wearing the shirt.

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Rio Negro in Amazon basin

The boys and I spent the last week in the Amazon forest. It was a good time & probably the last time any of us will be in this place. We stayed at the EcoPark, about an hour and a half outside Manaus on a branch of the Rio Negro (Black River).

The Rio Negro is black, as it name implies and it is a better place to be than many places in the Amazon basin, since there are fewer bugs. The Rio Negro flows through some swamps, where the water drops its silt and acquires an acid character. It is a mild acid, about as strong as black coffee, which it kind of resembles. This is enough to make life more difficult for insects. I was surprised at how few mosquitoes were around. I guess that is why.

A bus from Manaus takes you to a dock on the Rio Negro and the EcoPark picks you up in a small boat. There is a drier and a wetter season in this part of the Amazon basin and the river is high this time of year. This means that forests are flooded, sometimes several meters deep. This is a regular event and a good time for fish, since they can go into the erstwhile forests to find food and try to avoid becoming food for others by hiding in the trees.

The rivers are variable. They get very wide and then narrow out depending on the rain.  The flood is part of the life of the river.  The Mississippi used to be like this before we built all the levies and channels, although the Amazon is even bigger.  On the downside, for us at least, the wet season allows the fish and animals to spread out where we can’t see them as easily.  We went fishing for piranha.  The boys and I didn’t get any.  The guides told us that they were out there but more in the flooded forest.  Evidently they are not as numerous or aggressive as they seem to be in movies.

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Saturday in New York

The weather was nicer today; evidently Saturday will be the one nice day wedged between cold ones.  Today the wind had that soft feel; tomorrow back to the rough stuff.

We went to the Met today.  You can never spend enough time there, so we didn’t even try.  We just enjoyed what we could at the museum and then walked through Central Park to the Neil Simon Theater, where we saw the play “All the Way,” about Lyndon Johnson, starring Brian Cranston, who played Walter White on “Breaking Bad,” one of Chrissy’s favorite shows, which makes Cranston an actor she wanted to see in person.  It was a good play, worth seeing

On the way back to the hotel, we stopped at Lindy’s Café, where they claimed to have the world’s best cheesecake.  I don’t know if it was best, but it was very good and very big portions.  Chrissy and I also had Irish coffee in honor of St. Patrick’s Day tomorrow.

It was a full day and fun.  Chrissy arrived yesterday.  Instead of taking a taxi, we used one of those bike taxis.  It costs a lot more, is less convenient and unsafe in the traffic.  It is something interesting to do – once, maybe once.  Actually, I would not recommend it.

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Driving around Rio

You always pay more for taxis in Rio. They are used to tourists and they know that there is a kind of differential tourists are willing to pay, or maybe don’t know they are paying.  But this time I got by w/o too much trouble.  I suspect the driver that took us from the airport to the hotel was taking us for a ride.  When I noticed we seemed to be going the wrong way and commented to him, he told me that there was a big music festival and we could not take the usual shorter route.  Maybe that was true.  I ended up paying more for an extra-long ride and when he gave me change, he did so with small bills, pausing each time until I just told him to keep the rest.   But on the way back from Sugar Loaf, we got a driver who actually used the meter and it told the right amount.  We went with the notorious “flat rate” to the statue of Christ.  I didn’t mind paying, since the guy waited for us and took us back down.  When I came with Espen a few months ago it was hard to find a taxi back.  The convenience was worth the price and the taxi driver was interesting.

He told me that he had been driving cab for about seven years.  He was a cop before that, but police work was too dangerous.   He said that in his police academy class of seventy, twenty-four had been killed in the line of duty four years later when he decided to seek a more tranquil profession.  Of course, he was a cop in the middle of all that trouble with drug dealers in the favelas.  Things are calmer now.

Taxi drivers in Rio own and maintain their own cabs, although licensed and regulated by the city.  He can have up to two other people drive the car.    His car is completely flex-fuel.  It can run on gasoline, ethanol or natural gas.   These days by far the best fuel is natural gas.  It costs the least and gets the most mileage per unit, more than twice as much as ethanol.  Ethanol is the worst.  Mileage is poor for the price.  Gasoline is in the middle.   Natural gas also has the advantage of better engine wear and less pollution.   He asked if we use much natural gas in the U.S.   We don’t.  Busses often run on natural gas and some delivery fleets are turning over to gas, but we don’t currently have the infrastructure.  I suppose that might change with the fracking boom.   Changing to natural gas makes the cities cleaner and quieter than they would otherwise be, in addition to saving money.

Rio really is a pretty city.  Mariza is visiting and I wanted her to see it.  We went to Acre last time she was here.  That was an interesting experience, but not the pleasant one you get in Rio.   Rio is really one of the world’s most beautiful cities.

We saw a double rainbow over Copacabana.  It was gone before we got our cameras.  Would not have done it justice anyway.   But the red sky was still interesting.  Red sky at night, sailors delight. The picture doesn’t do that justice either.  

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Chapada dos Veadeiros

You don’t have to have a guide anymore to go into Chapada dos Veadeiros, but it is still a good idea. It supports the local economy and the guide can point out things you would otherwise miss. Our guide was very good, although he speaks only Portuguese. 

Local people made money by crystal mining.  It was not an ecologically benign operation.  Our guide told us that he was the son of miners and had mined himself for a time.  By the late 1980s, most of the best crystals were mined out.  Miners like our guide spent a lot of time sorting through the slag heaps.  Some crystals that were considered too small in earlier times were the best they could do later on.  Employing local people as guides gave them some income and also gave them incentive to preserve the environment.   It seemed to have worked.

Our guide clearly loved the land and knew a lot about it. The only problem with him was that he could walk too fast.  We took the waterfall route. We took the canyon route when I came with Chrissy a couple years ago.  Both are really nice.  Overall, I think the canyon route is a little nicer, but it is a close call.  The waterfall route has more spectacular views, but the canyon route has more interesting ones in some ways. Maybe it would be a good idea to stay for two days and do both. Each hike takes about five hours.  That includes a significant amount of time swimming or hanging around near the ponds and waterfalls. The walks are steep in places, but not very arduous.

The climate here is pleasant.  Because of the elevation, it rarely gets very hot and because of the tropical location it never gets cold at all. Seasons are wet and dry. Both times I visited were in the dry season. The area is semi-arid, but in a strange way. As in Brasília, it almost never rains during the dry season, but rains a lot during the rainy season, so it is very wet half the year and very dry the other half. The vegetation has to adapt to the more demanding dry season, so it looks like what you might find in parts of Arizona. As I wrote in the earlier post, São Jorge reminds me of Sedona and the area around is like parts of northern Arizona.  One big difference is that there is no cold weather here. There probably has not been any frost here for millions of years, maybe never. The other big difference is water. There is lots of water during the wet season, which keep the rivers running and the lakes full during the dry season.  It seems an anomaly to have so much water running through so dry a place.

The water from the Chapada dos Veadeiros flows into the Rio Preto, which empties into the Tocantins River. The Tocantins is often thought of as a tributary of the Amazon, but actually is its own basin and empties independently into the Atlantic Ocean through the Amazon delta.